It’s hard to know where to start a profile on Beau Miles. He’s lived about thirty different lives (a conservative, factually accurate figure), has approximately 3,000 divergent interests, and wholly defies pigeonholing.
To give insight into how hard this gig is, let’s imagine Beau at the bank, filling in a loan application, pausing when he reaches the dotted line for profession. He could legitimately write many things: filmmaker (he’s made hundreds, and has more than 600,000 YouTube subscribers); adventurer (that’s what all those films are about); author (of so many things, and working on his second book); academic (Dr Miles was lead academic of Monash University Outdoor Education until 2019); and there are many others that fit, too, like public speaker, head of production team, actor, thinker, and oddball. (Ed: You can also add contributor to Wild Magazine in here too!)
But the easiest, most accurate word is ‘poly-jobist’ a term Beau invented to describe himself: a person who is happily, deliberately a jack of all trades. He’s “never had a bad job”, but had a huge range of good ones, from guiding to carpentry to the more high-profile roles above, and is as happy talking about woodchopping as about his PhD thesis (The Secret Life of the Sea Kayaker, which involved making films about his paddling expedition across the Bass Strait.)
As anyone who’s read his writing or watched his films knows, he’s also a huge fan of tangents and distractions. For example, his 26-minute film about eating only beans for forty days (The Human Bean) delves into road-trips across America, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and how human biology means that by the end of his experiment with tinned food, flat moods and flatulence, his cells were made entirely of beans.
This diversity makes conversations with Beau entertaining and
